Sunil Sethi: The Strange Ways of Words

AL FRESCO

Words have a strange way of mutating and travelling over great distances to acquire new meanings and sometimes create entire vocabularies and even languages. Most people know that Urdu is a composite of Hindi and Persian, a language that evolved in the military camps of invaders of the sub-continent. What they may not know is that it comes from the same Arabic root "" meaning encampment "" that gave name to a new language in India but also travelled west to create the English word horde as in "thundering hordes".

David Crystal, the etymologist and author of Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, who has lately been in India, argues that Indian English is not merely a number of Indian words gifted to English but another kind of lingo that, before long, will overtake conventional forms of Queen's English. Prof. Crystal's kind of research has been going on for a long time.

In 1886, Henry Yule, a colonel in the Indian army, and Arthur Burnell of the Madras Civil Service produced the Hobson-Jobson, a glossary of several hundred thousand Anglo-Indian words and phrases that are commonly used in English. The dictionary has undergone revisions and remains a treasure trove of not just the Indian etymology of everyday words such as jungle, bungalow, purdah, khaki, mantra, guru and countless others but some unexpected surprises. Who would have thought that chintz, the word for the most English of printed textiles, actually originates from the Sanskrit chitra, meaning variegated or speckled, or possibly chint, an Indian cloth-printing technique? Either way chintz emerges from the flourishing textile exports in medieval India, just as calico is derived from the port of Calicut.

Prof. Crystal's opinion that trade and industry create new words and drive languages is not a new idea. For instance, there has been debate over the word "cash" for a long time. That it is of Indian origin is not doubted. But does it come from the Sanskrit karsha, a weight of silver or gold, or other Indian terms for low coinage such kasu in Tamil or kasi in Sinhala? Etymologists are still figuring it out. Yet he has a point that words and language can be a numbers game. If more Indians speak English than the native English, then meaning, expression and articulation are bound to change. That is also true of all languages "" French purists complain that their language is overrun by English words "" but Prof. Crystal says that, in the end, there will be so many kinds of English, and each so distinctive, that English speakers may require a dictionary to understand what is being said.

A famous, recent example of English as it is spoken, in all its weird modern manifestations, is provided by the award-winning British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen, best-known for his runaway hit film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Cohen's anarchic brand of humour in the guises he adopts "" of Borat, an anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist, or Ali G, a working-class Londoner speaking a Jamaican hybrid, or, Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion show presenter "" is politically and culturally incendiary, of course, but the joke is essentially linguistic. It's not immediately apparent what is going on because of the English he's speaking. Cohen's impersonations go beyond mimicking accents: they introduce us to "Kazakh English" or a London low lifer's "gangsta rappa" vocabulary.

Some analysts of language argue that the age of emails and cell phone messaging will increase our dependence on the written word rather than reduce it "" and that the only serious casualty will be punctuation. But that's again an argument that's been going on for years. In her stylish, popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves on why punctuation matters, Lynne Truss says that the comma has been put to so many uses that it's become a "kind of scary grammatical sheepdog". But Gertrude Stein called commas "servile" and refused to use any. And Peter Carey won the Booker Prize in 2001 for writing an entire novel without one.